Phones and TV services

Earlier this month I acquired Virgin Media TV, Broadband and phone. I'd always been a Sky TV man and still like what they do tremendously. Unfortunately, where we live the satellite dish could only be fitted to a wooden fence which meant any disturbance to the fence would result in a weaker signal. This was irritating when the problem would occur at a time when I wasn't in the mood to go out there with the satellite finder and tools and start readjusting.

I decided after a while to go ahead and get Virgin cable TV, the 30 mbps broadband and phone and save money at the same time. With £70 credit on the bill and half price TV for 6 months it was a sensible offer.

The two young guys came and installed everything cleanly and professionally and all is well. I didn't choose to take as many channels as with Sky but frankly I didn't watch them a great deal anyway. Since the Virgin TiVo box has 10 mbps broadband as standard I spend more time watching TV on demand and catchup TV now. Searching the backlog has resulted in a greater quality of programming to choose from and something my Sky setup was unable to do (easily) since my broadband was on the other side of the room.

Now although I have fewer channels I am less reliant on recording and watching from the schedule which means manually searching what is on or coming up, and now I can access more choice with fewer channels. Not only that but I have YouTube on the main TV screen.

One issue I had was the phone charges. Looking on the online itemised bill I noticed that an unanswered call to a mobile phone lasting just two seconds cost us 39 pence!

Now I have put a headset on to my PC and will make calls using Skype if my mobile signal is no good at home. Currently the signal is very poor in our house on O2 so we used to use a landline just so we could hear the other person and not get cut off. This is also beneficial for us as we used to phone abroad with an 0844 number. This was supposed to be 1p per minute but over the Virgin line it is a lot more than this!

So to summarise: Virgin is a quality service in my opinion and I'm enjoying the TV a lot more than I expected. The broadband is the best I've ever had. But beware of how much phone calls cost!